The Golden Age Of Gossip

These Days, Very Little Is Stronger Than 'Dirt' As Vip Doings Vie With Serious News For Media Center Stage

November 09, 2000|By Julia Keller, Tribune Cultural Critic.

We Americans are united by our ceaseless love of freedom, our unwavering devotion to democracy and our relentless search for the answer to this profound question:

What was Meg Ryan thinking.

Ryan, of course, is the mop-haired sprite who recently fled her marriage to fellow actor Dennis Quaid to play tonsil hockey with Aussie hunk Russell Crowe.

Please forgive the use of the phrases "tonsil hockey" and "Aussie hunk." They, like an intimate knowledge of Ryan's romantic escapades, are the byproducts of an age saturated by a once-notorious but now quasi-respectable entity: gossip.

Thanks to the Internet and to myriad entertainment-based TV shows, all of which seem to have covered the same Hollywood premiere the night before, gossip is, more than ever, a force to be reckoned with. That makes some people wonder if things have gone just a bit too far.

The definitions of words such as "news" and "information" have expanded so rapidly, with a blurring of lines and a crumbling of boundaries, that now virtually any fact about virtually anybody is considered everybody's business.

The word "gossip" has shed its slightly seedy edge, its aura of backstreet tawdriness. Gossip has gained not only power but legitimacy. It was gossip, after all, that helped to impeach a president, and many observers believe that gossip led the way in media coverage of the 2000 presidential race, as personalities took precedence over issues and qualifications.

Even the gossip-purveyors themselves are a bit startled at their newfound clout.

"It's almost as if the black sheep of the family suddenly got an inheritance from a wealthy, distant relative," said Ted Casablanca, gossip columnist for E! Online, a frequently visited Web site specializing in entertainment dish. "The rest of the family realizes it has to contend with this black sheep -- because the black sheep is wealthy and has power."

Liz Smith, the syndicated gossip columnist who recently chronicled her adventures in "Natural Blonde" (Hyperion), called the Internet a "horrible development" in the gossip business. "There are no editors, no publishers, no brakes. People are free to put anything they want on it. I don't read it. I don't want my mind sullied. I want to know where my gossip comes from.

"There used to be only a few gossip columnists. There are so many now."

Many columnists -- and many Web sites, too, including a slew that sling gossip about professions other than entertainment, such as law and investment banking. A large number of journalists, for instance, start their days by checking Poynter.org/medianews (formerly mediagossip.com), a site run by Evanston resident Jim Romenesko that keeps tabs on the practitioners of journalism themselves.

Mike Walker, who has written a gossip column for the National Enquirer for a quarter of a century, shares Smith's concerns about Internet gossip. The technology has given the green light to a passel of unruly pretenders to the gossip throne.

"I'm waiting for the grownups to be back in charge. Right now, it's the kids," he said. "Sure, there's something wonderfully adventurous about saying, `I'll just put this on the Web!' But you have to be careful. You have to be responsible."

Yet accuracy is not really the issue. For all of their apparent love of naughty innuendo, gossip columnists actually have an estimable track record when it comes to truth; like all journalists, they don't like being sued. A gossip columnist constantly forced to retract items soon would lose credibility.

The core of any exploration of the gossip culture, then, is not veracity, but cranial space: How much important information do we forgo learning so as to keep room free for knowing Madonna's latest squeeze? Why are we so preoccupied with information that is, by any honest measure, breathtakingly trivial?

And is something essential being lost -- a standard of seriousness or a benchmark for civilized life -- each time we decide to bend an ear to gossip?

Even Casablanca, who makes his living by disseminating fun but largely irrelevant facts about the famous, thinks enough is just about enough.

"People have bought into the notion that news and gossip are the same thing. They're not," he declared. "We had a hard time deciding who was best to run the country -- and it came down to who made us feel better. Gossip contributed to that tremendously. We're getting away from the issue of what's important to the country and the world. All we care about is: What's the dirt behind the candidate?"

Casablanca's boss, Scott Robson, editor in chief of E! Online, agreed that the line between gossip and news has thinned to invisibility. "The word `gossip' has definitely moved out of strictly tabloid sense of the word. Gossip columnists like Ted are reporting the truth, really doing research. It's not as if Ted whips it up in one night and we slap it onto the site the next day. It goes through a regular vetting process."